FORT BENNING, GA - Fort Benning's Civilian Personnel Online (CPOL), which vets candidates for civil employment, will soon begin posting the first of more than 700 job vacancies that will become available over the next two years. The jobs are a result of the post's transformation to the Maneuver Center of Excellence.
Janice Richardson, the U.S. Army Infantry Center's director of Resource Management, likened the new job listings to "a trickle." The flood will come late next year and in early 2011.
"There will be a lot of vacancies down the road, but right now we have a very limited number of jobs we'll be hiring for soon," Richardson said. "We'll use a phased hiring process over the next two years as facilities and funding becomes available."
The hiring process can appear to be very complicated and confusing to those who aren't familiar with post "structure," Richardson said. Fort Benning falls under the Army's Training and Doctrine Command.
Currently, there are about 600 TRADOC civilian positions at the Infantry School. When the Maneuver Center of Excellence stands up in September 2011, those positions will be absorbed into the MCOE, and more than 890 more will be added for a total of 1,465.
Slightly more than half of those - 760 in all - have already been spoken for by current employees at Fort Benning or Fort Knox, Ky., who qualify for what is called a "direct match" or "indirect match" - those who are already doing the jobs or those who are interested, have been displaced by the transformation and were given preference in the hiring process.
Employees at Fort Benning and Fort Knox were given the opportunity to secure a position in the new organization through the Civilian Volunteer Process, which ended last month. That leaves 705 jobs available in the next two years.
Those positions will be listed on the CPOL Web site, at http://acpol.army.mil/employment/, and some may be listed at usajobs.com.
The sheer volume of positions that must be filled to accommodate the Armor Schools move from Fort Knox may challenge the civilian hiring system, Richardson said. Officials are implementing a number of changes to streamline the process, which typically takes about 55 days from the time hiring actions are initiated by the activities in which the vacancies are located. CPAC has measures in place that will help reduce the hiring process to about 27 days.
Blanche Robinson, Human Resources officer at the Civilian Personnel Advisory Center, said the positions will be widely varied. They will include supply, budget and manpower, safety, clerical, administrative, blue collar and more.
Robinson encouraged those hoping to snag one of those jobs to continuously check the vacancy announcement board on the CPOL Web site.
RUMOR CONTROL
Numbers don't lie. But they do have a way of twisting the truth.
Those 705 TRADOC positions that will become available at Fort Benning over the coming months - that's not half the number of total job openings you'll see as an indirect result of the growth associated with BRAC actions on Fort Benning. BRAC planners say as many as 2,000 jobs will be created on post in the next few years.
Besides TRADOC, Fort Benning also has an Installation Management Command, which is responsible for managing the garrison much the way a city manager operates. Though the BRAC law did not directly impact Fort Benning's IMCOM, there may be several hundred civilian garrison positions added simply to accommodate the growth brought about by the establishment of the MCOE, said Joyce Golden, a senior budget analyst for the Installation Management Command.
The increase in population of about 30,000 permanent party Soldiers, family members, civilian employees and contractors, and another 30,000 trainees annually, will task current facilities and services. Martin Army Community Hospital will be replaced by a bigger facility, and medical and dental services will expand. The commissary will expand. Morale, Welfare and Recreation will see an increase in demand for lodging, entertainment and food. That means an increase in the number of employees within the service sector.
Those figures do not factor in the number of contractors who will be employed to see the post through construction projects for the next seven years. Current estimates put the total of contractors working on post each day at 2,000.
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